Austria's XY Mutation
I read this column by Heather Mallick and was struck by how seldom we in the New World look upon white western Europe as fatally backward. I mean, you'd hardly think today, if you just wandered on to Earth from another planet, that it was the Germans, not the Palestinians, who perpetrated the Holocaust. Instead, you'd think Germany was the home of racial tolerance and egalitarianism, not the hotbed of anti-immigrant sentiment and sexism it actually is, as are many of its white European neighbours - as they've always been and maybe always will be.
And to read the news today, the behaviour of Josef Fritzl is very clearly something we associate with the Taliban, but not something we would think to associate with white European men - hence our shock that this sort of thing would go on unnoticed in a white European country - even a white European country like Austria, with its open armed welcome to Kurt Waldheim, Jorge Haider, and all manner of anti-immigrant political movements. Funny how we manage to be complacent about white society's unequal treatment of women, while focusing to the point of going to war (something Americans certainly waited until the last minute to do when it was Germans threatening to take over the world, not Asians or Muslims) on Muslim society's unequal treatment of women.
So read Heather Mallick's piece. It raises some interesting questions about who we wouldn't dream of tackling on their treatment of women:
